Stars in the night
by Dark Empress V
Summary: Story starts with the alternate ending where Cal meets Rose on the Carpathia. Then they follow their own paths, which sometimes cross in interesting ways. Jack Dawson features too.
1. Chapter 1

In the stars

Everything was white. There were a lot of dark colors coasting around, but all he could see was white. The white waves washing against the tiny rescue boats, the white lapel of the officer that pulled the passengers on board, the white shirts of the first class passengers who somehow lost their black overcoats in the struggle for life that had raged in the final death throes of the Titanic. White were the faces of women waiting to learn of their men's fate, white were the hands of a man on Cal's boat who turned out to have died during the night from cold and no one noticed till his name was called from Carpthia and his wife noticed him lying lifeless of the lifeboat. White was the colour of Cal's shirt, clinging wetly to his shivering flesh. White.. White as Rose's face when she said she'd rather die with a penniless man she just met than stay with him, the mighty, but oh so hated and despicable Caledon Hockley..

And now what what was she – one more of those white, white corpses, driftig round or in the doomed ship, her hands perhaps joined with the white hand of the equally dead Jack Dawson, her ivory body clad in Cal's black coat and the color scheme broken only by the vivid blue of the diamond in the coat's pocket - the diamond she did not know she had and Cal's only link to his now dead fiance.

Those were the thoughts of Caledon Hockley as his rescue boat neared the ship Carpathia and they continued as he was pulled on board, provided with blankets and soothing words. He did not sit down for one second.

Despite the exhaustion, the racking cough beginning to take hold of his lungs, he went down to the lower deck, to steerage, to search for her. He searched and searched, made one mistake after another but there she finally was. Standing alone, staring at the horizon, wearing his coat, and the same expression of defiance on her face.

He approached her, even though he knew the meeting would only end in daggers and bitter reprisals.

"So I lived. How awkward for you"

Such were her first words, bitter, spat out with violence from those lips he had once, long ago hoped to kiss but now could only observe and measure the level of disgust they directed at him.

She _hated_ him, was the bitter truth.. Long before whatever happened on the Titanic. He was the thitry-something year old businessman who threatened her youth and freedom threatened every dream Jack Dawson had taught her she could follow. He was the enemy and no matter what he said it would be wrong.

"Your mother is woried for you," he offered, for the sake of a woman he came to know well and who, despite her many faults, loved her daughter and wanted the best for her, in her own way.

"You will tell her her daughter died with the Titanic, and I will keep your actions that night secret."

Rose delivered the ultimatum without tearing her gaze from the moon for a moment, not even gracing Cal with one glance, reminding him of his despicable actions in few plain, succinct words.

"Is this in any way unclear Mtr Hockey? - she asked, reminding him of one of their less pleasant conversations on the still intact Titanic when it had been he who had had the upper hand.

Oh, she was good, mimicking his tone to the note.

"I shall do as you ask." he said, fighting to keep his voice level, partly surprised at his own compliance, partly beyond caring, since whatever he said would not bring her back to him and would only result in a scene.

"Goodbye Mr Hockley" – she said in that perfectly polite voice of hers, the one she reserved for particularly annoying servants or aggravating members of high society.

"Goodbye, Rose – he refused to drop her given name and savored its sound on his tongue for one more minute before he turned and walked away, his sideways glance catching only a wisp of her red hair, the only thing he'd have to hold on to for all those months of missing her and raging at her and contemplating his own utter defeat.

That wisp of red hair became forever ingrained in his memory upon the background of star-strewn sky, contrasting with the iciness of stars. Somehow, his mind associated that union of the fiery redness and cold whiteness with lost freedom, as if he had suddenly become imprisoned, in the middle of this wide, wide ocean.


	2. Chapter 2

The next few days were a haze. Cal could not remember ever feeling this way, except when he had had a bad cold and they gave him this strong medicine that made him numb to the big picture of things and yet made every individual noise, image and light jump out at him with painful intensity.

He did not search for Rose on the ship again. The knowledge that she was there and that he could do nothing to bring her to him was enough. He did now know how she managed to avoid being recognized by other first class passengers, but guessed that wearing rags and remaining on the steerage board of the Carpathia made it pretty easy for her. Not many first class dandies would lower themselves to such filthy regions anyway. For all he knew, Rose might have been reunited with Dawson already. He did not know if the gutter rat had lived or died, but if he had in fact survived, he would make sure she'd be protected from Cal and his society.

What remained for him to do these last few days aboard Carpathia was to soothe the mourning Ruth while constantly cursing himself for concealing from her the truth of her daughter's rescue… Ruth was inconsolable and sometimes her despair got so unmanageable that Cal was on the verge of bursting out and revealing the whole truth to her.

However, he knew what would follow if he did. Ruth would insist on Rose's return into the fold, and Rose, in revenge would reveal to all American society how her beloved fiancé tired to kill her with a gun while she ran for dear life into the bowels of a sinking ship. No, despite everything that night did to Cal's mental state, he wasn't deranged enough to destroy his own future (whatever it may be) or to threaten his family's name in this manner. All he could do was go out onto the freezing deck when Ruth's hysterics got especially intense and call up a steward requesting another portion of that potent, wonderfully numbing anti-cold medicine and a glass of brandy.

Sitting on a deckchair in the shivering weather with alcohol and some doubtful-quality drug in his system were actually the most bearable moments of that journey.

Within the haze, he found enough presence of mind to wire messages to his father – first about the loss of their luggage, paper money in the safe and the diamond, of course - he knew his father's priorities.. Then he informed him about the sad demise of Rose, her maid Trudy and his own manservant, Lovjeoy. He also managed to communicate to his father the hour upon which Carpathia would descend on the New York pier and arrange for a transport with bodyguards which would whisk him and Ruth away from the press mayhem with as little fuss as possible.

Quite the efficient Hockley male he was, Cal chuckled over his brandy, drawing appalled glances of some first class widows. How could one laugh at such a time? Then they noticed the brandy in his hand and the several empty glasses standing on the floor by his deckchair and nodded to each other. Each person grieved their own way.

The day finally came. Or rather night. The rainy, pelting night when Carpathia finally docked in New York. Cal was just emerging from his brandy –cough syrup haze and was beginning to experience the first stages of a massive hangover. Each step down toward the pier and each flash of the photographers' camera was like an icicle inserted into Cal's brain and it was all he could do to keep the sobbing Ruth upright on his arm, walk straight and make the impression of his face as solemn and impassive as possible.

Luckily Nathan Hockley hired the very best bodyguards and very soon the whole party was whisked off into the waiting Hockley limousine and departed with one final "no comment" spoken in the harshest Nathan Hockley tone into the ear of a particularly insistent reporter.

Even so, Cal did manage to turn his head toward the pier where steerage passengers were being shepherded into crooked coaches to be deposited in New York's cheapest hotels or hospitals. He was never quite sure if it was wishful thinking or an actual image, but he did manage to see a female figure with a flash of untamed red hair escaping the huge black coat enveloping her getting into one of those unfortunate carriages. He turned his head away quickly, and focused on Ruth's latest enquiry, but the sense of a door snapping closed on a cage suspended in an immense space yet again enveloped him before he shook it off and attempted to focus on the present moment.


	3. Chapter 3

This chapter introduces a new character of my own making, she should make things interesting. If you look closely, there's also a hint to what a character we all know and love is doing. Jack's turn is in the next chapter. Sorry for the wait, had to deal with some life issues! Enjoy!

She was too fragile and had to be protected. She could do very little herself because she might get hurt, or worse yet, because she simply wasn't able and might become laughable. No, better keep her at home, hire all the appropriate tutors and just be safe. Why subject the family to additional ridicule? It was enough that her mother liked to take to her cups (a badly kept secret), and her father, although being in a respectable occupation and having quite a success with the stocks, had the misfortune of being a Polish bourgeois immigrant and never could count among the big shots of early 1900's Wall Street tycoons. If there was one word Violett Cole could use to describe herself was average. Suppressed came second in her very much enhanced vocabulary (she tended to read rather a lot) but she would never use it in front of her mother or grandmother, because that would just offend them and make them call her ungrateful.

So, following the usual course of lifestyle for young ladies of the polite society, Violett was trained by all the appropriate tutors and then attended a very appropriate finishing school. Her classroom achievements were, similarly to the overall tendencies of her family – at the same time respectable and a little problematic. While she displayed perfectly average knowledge of geography and history (excepting the ancient history, in which she was particularly well-educated), she absolutely excelled at languages. She seemed to have an inherent understanding of their mechanisms and seemed to not so much learn them as imbibe them. This meant that although, as a daughter of an immigrant, English was not her native tongue, she spoke it with a proficiency that sometimes shamed her born and bred American classmates. German, French and Italian were also perfected to a degree which allowed her to converse with foreign dignitaries with much ease, a feature that made her a target of hate of most diplomats' daughters

Despite her lack of popularity among her own age group did not prevent her from becoming an object of interest to said ambassadors. They enjoyed her conversations and some of the yournger ones even started entertaining thoughts of courtship. These thought were soon quenched by their well meaning friends who thought Miss Cole to be far too outspoken and opinionated for a female and exhibiting an overtly visible inclination to the arts. The girlswas musical, as all the young ladies of the era were encouraged to be, but her affiliation with the art went far beyond the necessary and proper. She went as far as to persuade her father to enroll her into a conservatory (gasp) and everyone knew that conservatories produced either singing tutors for rich ladies (hardly a suitable position for a girl of her stature) or future vaudeville starlets which had no respectability at all. To Violett, all this was a drama she could well do without. Her mother's drinking provided enough stressful situations and being judged for her only escape – music - was just too much of a bother. The expectations society piled upon her made her almost retch with disgust – marry some old, balding or if she was lucky, young handsome and controlling husband and bend to his every wish and whim, become a breeding machine and lose all her looks…. Tend to the needs of a screaming child she never fancied having… None of these prospects were particularly appealing.

Years went by, suitors came and went, and eventually Miss Violett Cole found herself labeled as being "on the shelf" Twenty nine, no husband, no fiancé in sight, only eccentric behavior and too much intellect and unrealistic dreams for her own good. Her father loved her dearly and was too preoccupied with their problematic mother and his business ventures to interfere much in his daughter's life, but he appreciated her intelligence and loved her enough to want her to achieve the life she wanted to live, not the one society demanded, however much it inconvenienced him at occasional parties. – Your daughter is quite a handful John, is she not? At her age, insisting on all those silly eccentricities.

- Well, she is devoted to her passions, I respect that and admire her conviction. Not every woman of note has to come with a husband and child nowadays, Thomas. If you haven't noticed, our society is changing.

Mostly after such comments the beleaguered Mr. Cole was left alone , but Violett had a different set of problems. Having waited for many years to muster up the courage to give into her artistic inclinations, she suddenly found that 29 was not considered the freshest age of a musical debutante and not many theaters or concert halls were willing to give her a listen or even take her seriously. She did not look her age, but the question was asked nevertheless and often dismissed her at the outset. Increasingly desperate, she began approaching less, so to say respectable venues, disguising her appearance with a generous amount of makeup and a gentle face mask that rendered her unrecognizable to closer acquaintance. All she wanted to do was sing, or act and improve her skills. The alternative was just too horrid to ponder. An old decaying lady with unfulfilled dreams staring in the mirror and counting her missed opportunities. This way she stumbled upon a semi-respectable (sometimes covertly visited by high class gentlemen) music club which did not ask about its performers provenance, only demanded that she be clean and not of the prostitute profession. Auditions were held of course, and these Violett passed rather well with the provision that she should take more time to practice her higher pitch.

A few other girls made the cut – a rather shy blonde who looked to be about 22 and a very nervous looking and mysterious red-head who spoke only when spoken to and trembled at every sound of a posh carriage pulling by. Violett was too terrified and excited herself to pay the girls much attention, but she supposed they came in with some baggage of their own and wished them the best. Life on stage was not an easy path to choose.

Thus, a new cast for shows in a club under the pretentious name "Empress" was formed.

Many a high class gentleman looked forward to his first visit there, although some of them got way more than what they bargained for…


End file.
